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Friday, February 23, 2007

Colossal squid or no? (paca)

I'm just confused by this. There's a science article on Yahoo that some New Zealand fisherman caught a colossal squid - the actual common species name - off the coast of Antartica while fishing for Chilean sea bass. The squid is supposed to be 36 feet long, and they say if you make calamari rings from the tentacles, they would be as big as a tire.

Thought 1: That's a big squid.

Thought 2: It's cool that they found it, but is it good that they caught it and that it's now dead?

But the confusion comes from this picture. Is this supposed to be the colossal squid here? The tentacles sure don't look 36 feet long, but maybe they are, since I can't see the whole thing. And aren't squid supposed to have beaks? That looks more like a hole for a mouth there. And they have these kind of tube/cone-shaped bodies. And they have 10 tentacles (turns out to be 8 arms and 2 tentacles), while I only clearly see 8 in that picture. And I've never seen a live squid, but the little ones you buy in the store here are all white to tan or so. This things purple which is exactly the color of an octopus. So what I gather from all this is that it's not just that this picture is not THE colossal squid. It's not a colossal squid. In fact, I don't think it's a squid at all, but a large octopus.

And when you see the pictures of squid here, wikipedia, I think you will agree that the Yahoo picture is no squid. Instead the New Zealand ministry just sent whatever pic they had lying around of a fisherman and a cephalopod. At least it's a sorta big one.

Am I wrong?

UPDATE: Maybe I'm wrong. There are 9 pictures at that Yahoo link. If you look at the other ones with the squid in the water, it's clearly a squid and not an octopus. Then you look back at the original picture that confused me and maybe all that purple back behind the tentacles is the huge squid body. As for the beak? I guess it's just somewhere else. The colossal squid looks really different from the giant squid tentacle-wise.